The most humble yet critical link in the textile recycling chain—collection and sorting—has finally received an international award. At the Textile Recycling Expo held in Brussels, Belgium, from June 24-25, 2025, Green Worms Eco Solutions, a social enterprise based in Kerala, India, won the inaugural Textile Collection and Sorting Award. This signals that the global circular textile economy is shifting its focus from downstream processing to upstream organization.
Event Background
The winning company is not a traditional recycling giant. Green Worms Eco Solutions was founded by Jabir Karat in 2014, starting from his work with marginalized ragpickers in Mumbai. Karat realized that large amounts of reusable textiles were being discarded as waste, and he built a systematic collection and sorting network. After a decade of operation, the company has established a stable textile waste recycling chain in South India, covering the entire process from community collection to preliminary sorting.
The decision by the Brussels expo organizers to award the first prize to an Indian social enterprise, rather than a mature recycling system in Europe or America, is itself revealing. For India and the broader South Asian region, this is not just an honor but a recognition of a low-cost, high-social-participation model. Currently, the global textile recycling rate remains below 15%, with most waste fabrics ending up in landfills or incinerators, while developing countries are both the main sources and transit points for waste textiles.
Industry Impact
From an industry perspective, this award conveys three key judgments. First, the international textile recycling field is now identifying 'collection and sorting' as a technological bottleneck. In recent years, capital and policy have focused more on back-end technologies like chemical recycling and fiber regeneration, but the low efficiency of front-end blended fabric sorting has directly constrained back-end capacity. Green Worms' award shows that the industry is beginning to confront this 'bottleneck'.
Second, the South Asian model could become a new variable in the global textile waste supply chain. Countries like India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are both major textile producers and primary destinations for used clothing from Europe and America. If localized collection networks like Green Worms can scale up, they will significantly reduce cross-border recycling logistics costs and create opportunities for formalizing informal employment.
Third, for buyers and brands, this means further upgrades in supply chain traceability requirements. In the future, when brands claim to use recycled fibers, they may not only need to verify the recycling process but also demonstrate that the raw material collection and sorting stages meet environmental and social responsibility standards. Green Worms' award essentially sets a benchmark for such 'front-end certification'.